Category: Chess For Beginners

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Chess Noob #12- Simple Checkmates

Posted on August 17, 2012by regencyadmin

Now that you know notation, we can start looking at some positions and games and analyzing, etc.  In other words, now you can really start to learn to become a better chess player by reading books and blogs and solving puzzles, etc.

Let’s look at a few simple checkmates that are standard 1st time player mates to learn.

Fool’s Mate

This first simple mate (and actually entire GAME) we’re going to learn is titled “Fool’s Mate” because “only a fool would make such moves”!  It is the fastest possible checkmate where the entire game lasts only TWO MOVES!

1. f3   e5; 2. g4   Qh4#

Scholar’s Mate

Scholar’s Mate gets attempted quite a lot in novice play and even some higher ranked players will go for it as a type of fear tactic, so it’s good to learn both what it is and how to stop it.

The moves for a Scholar’s Mate are: 1. e4   e5; 2. Qh5  Nc6; 3. Bc4   Nf6; 4. Qxf7#

There are a few variations of this from white’s side(such as bringing the Bishop out before the Queen, or bringing the Queen to f3 instead of h5), but that’s the basic idea.  As black, there are many ways to guard against this particular mate.

One way NOT to block is to threaten the Queen with g6.  This results in a dangerous trap that allows White to check with the Queen (Qxe5+), forking the King and Rook:

You may think of answering 2. Qh5 with Nc6.  This will still drop the e-pawn with check… not the worst thing in the world, but still not very ideal. 2. … Nc6 is still a good answer to block against the e-pawn capture.  When White brings the Bishop to c4 for the threat of a mate, you can now push the g-pawn to stop the mate as the King/Rook fork is no longer an issue thanks to the e-pawn being protected by a knight.

Quick Smothermate Trap

A Smothermate, as talked about in a previous blog, is when Checkmate with a Knight when the opponent’s King is blocked in by pieces (and can’t move) that can’t capture said Knight.  Here is a cool little smothermate I saw recently that was very fast…

1. e4  e5; 2. Nf3  Nc6; 3. Bc4  Nd4; 4. Nxe5  Qg5; 5. Nxf7 (forking the Queen and Rook and can’t be captured by the King because it’s protected by a Bishop):

then black resumes- 5. … Qxg2; 6. Rf1 (so it doesn’t get taken) Qxe4+; 7. Be2 (moving the queen there would just result in a queen capture… which, given the circumstances might be the better idea for white at this point) Nf3#

These three fast mates are all possible (and infact, Scholar’s Mate happens quite frequently in beginning chess players’ games).  Now that you know them, you can try them out on your friends, and protect against them when your friends try them on you!

Have a topic you’d like me to cover or a question you’d like to ask? send me an e-mail at [email protected]

CategoriesChess For Beginners

Chess Noob #11 – Time Control

Posted on August 8, 2012by regencyadmin

If you’ve ever seen people playing chess in a park somewhere (even if it’s just in a movie like “Searching for Bobby Fisher”… which I might do a movie review of for a blog one day), you’ll notice they are often moving quickly and hitting clocks.

When a player is brand new to chess, one of two things will happen: 1) they are totally scared of the clock and/or forget it’s even there and keep forgetting to hit it, or 2) they are so overzealous about the appeal of hitting a clock that they bang the buttons so hard it seems like they may cause collateral damage!

But what is the clock really for, and what do time controls mean?  Let’s take a look.

Time control is how long each player has to complete their portion of a chess game.  This can be anywhere from many hours to just a few minutes.  Every tournament will have a time control written in specific ways.  Every internet chess website will have various time controls to choose from as well.

If the game is not over but one player runs out of time on their clock, that player automatically loses the game.  This is called “losing on time”

On tournament posters, you’ll see the time control written as (# of moves)/(length of time).  This will often be followed by something like SD/(length of time) or (length of time)d or (length of time)inc.  Here’s a few examples:

“G/60” would mean “game in 60″… in other words each opponent gets 1 hour on their side of the clock (making a potentially 2-hour game) and the game MUST be finished within that time limit.  As stated before, if a player runs out of time before the game is over, they lose the game.

“40/90, SD/1” means 40 moves in 90 minutes followed by an hour of sudden death.  In other words, each player gets 90 minutes on their clock.  If the game is still going after both players have made 40 moves, and neither player has run out of time, an additional hour is added to both sides of the clock and the game MUST conclude by the end of the new time.

“G/45, 5d” Like before this would mean “game in 45 minutes”, but this has the addition of a 5-second time delay.  Time Delay is when the time on the clock (always digital for delay) pauses for the first few seconds (in this case 5 seconds) of every turn before counting down.  This extra time is to give the player adequate time to write the notation for the move that was just made by their opponent, without cutting into their time.

“40/90, 30inc” is 40 moves in 90 minutes followed by a time where 30 second increments are added to the clock.  Incremental time control is a fairly new idea and only comes on the newest clocks.  In the United States, it’s only used in the upper sections of big tournaments, although internationally FIDE uses it for all their events.  What it means is that an increment of time is added to a players clock so that they will have at least a certain amount of time to make a move.  In this example, after the first 40 moves (which each player has 90 minutes to make), sudden death comes into effect but instead of a set time control, 30 seconds is added to their clock after every move.  This ensures that even if a player is basically out of time, they’ll have a minimum of 30 seconds to make a move.  If incremental time controls aren’t utilized, a player could have to make a move with only a couple seconds to spare (as in literally 2 seconds).

It would be wise to invest in a digital chess clock that has at least a time delay function, such as the DTG series clocks which can be purchased right here at The Regency Chess Company.

Have a topic you’d like me to cover or a question you’d like to ask? send me an e-mail at [email protected]

CategoriesChess For Beginners

Chess Noob #10 – How the Rules of Chess Have Changed

Posted on July 10, 2012by regencyadmin

Josh from New Jersey asked me “Why is it that Pawns are allowed to move 2 spaces in the beginning?”

This is a great question on the history of chess, and so rather than writing a mini-blog to answer that question alone, I thought I’d go over several rules of chess that have changed over the centuries.  Some of these changes include how various pieces move, the appearance of the chess board, and how to win a chess game.

Pawn Movement

Originally, Pawns could only move forward one space at a time on every turn.  Around the 1500’s, it was decided that the game of chess needed to be sped up and made more exciting.  One of the things done to accomplish this was to allow the Pawn the option of moving up to 2 spaces on it’s first turn and therefore adding variety to the game (would the pawn move just one space or 2) and new strategies.  When it became apparent that a player could use this rule to avoid capture (by moving the Pawn 2 spaces instead of 1 space in which it might get captured by a Pawn on the 5th rank), the rule for En Passant was added.

Pawn Promotion

Originally, Pawns did not promote when they reached the 8th rank, there merely could not move any more during the game.  It wasn’t until the middle ages that it was decided to allow Pawns to be promoted to other pieces if they made it all the way across the board, but they could only turn into a Queen (which, at that time, was the weakest piece in the game).  In the late 1400’s, when the Queen became a much more powerful piece, players were given the option of promoting their Pawns to any other piece.  In the 1700’s, it was ruled that a Pawn could only be promoted to a piece that had already been captured (essentially putting a fallen piece piece back on the board in the Pawn’s place).  This changed again in the 1800’s to it’s current form where a Pawn, when reaching the other side of the board, can be promoted to any piece, even one that has not been captured (essentially allowing a player to have multiple Queens on the board).

Bishops

Bishops have always been able to move diagonally.  However to start with, a Bishop could only move up to 2 spaces at a time.  Modern day chess has the Bishop moving diagonally as many spaces as it likes.

Queens

The Queen was originally the weakest piece on the board!  The very first time it was moved it could be moved in any direction up to 2 spaces, but for every move after that it could only move diagonally 1 space at a time!  It wasn’t until the late 1400’s that the Queen was increased to it’s current powerful status as a piece that can move any direction as many spaces as it likes.

Stalemate

Stalemate has changed often throughout the history of chess.  Up until the 15th century, a Stalemate was considered a win for the person that could force one to happen.  Then, until the 16th century, it was considered an “inferior win”… it would still count as a win for the person who caused the Stalemate to happen, but in a tournament with money prizes they’d only be eligible for half the winnings.  For a while (and in certain countries) a Stalemate was not allowed.  If a player made a move that caused a Stalemate to occur, they were forced to take the move back and make a new move instead.  In the 19th century, it was declared that a Stalemate should be treated as a draw, although to this day there are still many chess experts who believe it should once again be considered a win for whomever can force the stalemate to happen.

Checkmate

Up until the 1300’s, there were 3 ways to win a chess game: 1) Checkmate your opponent, 2) your opponent resigns, 3) capture all of your opponent’s pieces (minus the King).  In the 1300’s, it was declared that taking all your opponent’s pieces no longer counted as a win, you had to Checkmate them.

Threefold Repetition

The threefold repetition rule (if the same position is repeated on 3 consecutive turns, the game is a draw) did not come about until the 1880’s.

The 50-move Rule

The 50-move Rule (if 50 moves are made without capturing any pieces or moving any pawns, the game is a draw) was introduced in 1561 by Ruy Lopez.  In the 1600’s, Pietro Carrera said it should be 24 moves.  In the 1800’s, Bourdonnais said it should be 60.  For a while it was decided that all winnable endgames could be won in 50 moves or less, but then in the 20th century there were a few exceptions found.  Because of these exceptions, for a while, it was declared you could have up to 100 moves in certain endgame situations.  In 1989 that number was reduced to 75 moves, and in 2001 it was changed to 50 moves for all endgames, no matter the position.

Time Control

The first use of time control for games (which we’ll talk about in the next blog) was not introduced until the mid-1800’s.

White moves first

The rule that white moves first was not introduced until 1889.

My how things change!

Have a topic you’d like me to cover or a question you’d like to ask? send me an e-mail at [email protected]

CategoriesChess For Beginners

About the lecture/analysis (sorry it’s late)

Posted on July 10, 2012by regencyadmin

I know I said I was going to post a blog right after the lecture by GM Sam Palatnik.  I was unable to find the time, however, to even turn my laptop on (partly because of how long some of my chess matches lasted, and partly because my laptop is an ancient piece of machinery that LITERALLY takes over 10 minutes to load and another 5 minutes to even open an internet browser.

That being said, I also didn’t bother to take notes on things from the lecture to rehash for you, dear novice chess playing reader, because it quickly became apparent that the lecture was not geared toward the beginning chess player.  This blog is!  The lecture would have been over the heads of many of my readers for the simple reason that it was mostly about various systems and how to deal with them… and since you may not know any openings yet (I know I haven’t discussed any openings yet in this blog… partly because openings are not my strong point) the lecture would not have been all that useful to you.

I also attended some of the analysis the grand master provided for player’s games.  I wanted him to analyze a game I had just lost, but there were several people ahead of me and by the time it would have been my turn, he started packing it in to go to lunch, so I never got my turn.  *sad face*

I will say that GM Sam Palatnik is a very good speaker despite his thick Ukrainian accent.  For a man his age, the great chess player was very good at being relative (and fun) to the modern (younger) chess player.  He would make amusing quips that had everyone in the room laugh out loud and was very good at demonstrating his ideas in concise and understandable ways.  It’s a shame he didn’t have the time to analyze my game (luckily a few friends of mine at the tournament went over it with me and we found the move I should have made – rather than the mistake I made that in my opinion lost the game for me).

So I apologize I didn’t get the article up when I said I would and about what I said I would, but what you CAN take from the lecture you didn’t attend is this: Buy GM Sam Palatnik’s books (they can be found on Amazon.com) to learn about various systems of play (including the Sicilian and the Tarrasch) and chess strategies and tactics planning for the tournament player.

CategoriesChess For Beginners

Chess Noob #9 – Algebraic Notation

Posted on July 4, 2012by regencyadmin

Last time, we learned about an older form of notation called Descriptive Notation.  It used to be the only thing players and books would use to notate moves made in a chess game.  After the 1970’s, however, a new form of notation came around called Algebraic notation, which uses less characters and less writing in general.

Here are the symbols used in Algebraic notation:

R is for Rook.

B is for Bishop.

N is for Knight.

K is for King.

Q is for Queen.

x is the symbol for capturing a piece.

+ is the symbol for Check.

# is the symbol for Checkmate in algebraic  notation.

= is the symbol for Pawn promotion.  After the = will be the symbol for whichever piece you’ve turned the Pawn into (usually Q for Queen)

0-0 is for Castling on the kingside. (The Rook moves 2 spaces)

0-0-0 is for Castling on the queenside. (The Rook moves 3 spaces)

1-0 is the symbol for black resigning (1 win for white, 0 for black)

0-1 is the symbol for white resigning (0 wins for white, 1 for black)

1/2-1/2 is the symbol for a draw (1/2 win for both sides) either by draw offer, stalemate, 50 move rule (the 50 move rule says that if the opponents have both made 50 moves and not a single piece has been captured, then the game is a draw), or 3-move repetition (if the two opponents make the exact same moves 3 times consecutively, the game is a draw).

a-h are the files of the chess board.

1-8 are the ranks of the chess board.

Now that we have our legend of symbols, let’s talk about how to use them in

Algebraic Notation

To start with, since algebraic notation uses the lettered and numbered chess board that we’ve used in all blogs up to the one on descriptive notation, let’s look at the starting set-up:

You probably have already guessed that you won’t need to keep track of Kingside or Queenside like you did with algebraic.  You also don’t need to worry about the starting positions for the purpose of labeling files, or counting spaces from each opponent.  you’ll be using letters and numbers, making writing moves much quicker to see and comprehend (at least when playing on a board with numbers and letters, which most modern boards have).

You’ll also notice a couple things are missing from our legend.  Algebraic notation does not use the Pawn symbol, nor does it use the – to notate movement.  All moves just have what space they land on (unless there are 2 pieces of the same type that can get to same space, which we’ll discuss in a moment) by what piece is landing where.  And if there is no piece listed, just an end space, it’s assumed it was a Pawn move.

So, going back to our same examples:

Those two Pawn moves would be written as

e4          c5

Becomes

exd5

Where we only care about the starting space because it’s a pawn.

This is now

Nxb7

Clearly, this is a much cleaner way to write this move than the descriptive version of

N(QB)xP(QN)

And finally our checkmate is

Qxf7#

But what if a piece other than a pawn is moving?

Comparing this Bishop Check move…

In Descriptive it would be: B-QN5    Notice that it’s a 5, not a 4 because in descriptive it goes from the prospective of the player making the move

In Algebraic it would be simply Bb4  Notice we don’t even bother putting the dash to notate movement.  Again, it’s a much faster, cleaner way to write.

And what if two pieces can get to the same space?

Here, both white kNights can get to the same space.  I’ve circled the one we’re going to move there.

In Descriptive this is: N(KB)-Q2  The Knight in line with the Kingside Bishop moves to the second space in the Queen file

In Algebraic this is: Nfd2  The Knight in the f file moves to d2.

If both pieces were even i the same file… let’s say the Knight on c4 was actually on f5 and you wanted to use that one to take the pawn at h4, you’d just write Nf5xh4.  If there were no pawn there to take and you just moved there it would be Nf5h4.

So you can see why Algebraic notation is the more widely used notation now days.  It’s fast, simple, and doesn’t involved any counting.  It also makes mistakes in the notation almost obsolete where as with descriptive notation it’s not unlikely to see someone getting their kingside and queenside mixed up, or numbering from only their perspective and not their opponent’s.

You can use whichever version you like of course.  There are people that still use descriptive notation (I actually still use it myself so I can re-play the games on any chess set – even those that aren’t lettered and numbered-  and because I’ve been using it for so long it’s like a second language for me).  Algebraic is what you’ll find in most modern books, though.


CategoriesChess For Beginners

Chess Noob #8 – Descriptive Notation

Posted on June 30, 2012by regencyadmin

If you play chess online against an opponent or against a chess program on your computer, you’ll notice that the software keeps track of all the moves made in the game with  combination of letters and numbers.  When you play chess in a tournament, you are expected to keep track of your moves and the moves of your opponent in much the same way.  This detailed list of every move made in a chess game is called notation.

There are two main types of notation: descriptive notation, and algebraic notation.  Algebraic notation is the more modern and widely used form of notation, but we’ll go over each type of notation and you can decide which you’d rather use.  In this blog, we’ll only be talking about descriptive.  In the next blog, we’ll talk about algebraic notation and compare it to descriptive and compare the two.

P is for Pawn.  This is used in descriptive notation ONLY.  You’ll understand why once we talk about algebraic notation.

R is for Rook.

B is for Bishop.

N is for Knight.

K is for King.

Q is for Queen.

– is the symbol for movement.  This is used in descriptive notation ONLY.

x is the symbol for capturing a piece.

+ is the symbol for Check.

++ is the symbol for Checkmate in descriptive notation.

= is the symbol for Pawn promotion.  After the = will be the symbol for whichever piece you’ve turned the Pawn into (usually Q for Queen)

0-0 is for Castling on the kingside. (The Rook moves 2 spaces)

0-0-0 is for Castling on the queenside. (The Rook moves 3 spaces)

1-0 is the symbol for black resigning (1 win for white, 0 for black)

0-1 is the symbol for white resigning (0 wins for white, 1 for black)

1/2-1/2 is the symbol for a draw (1/2 win for both sides) either by draw offer, stalemate, 50 move rule (the 50 move rule says that if the opponents have both made 50 moves and not a single piece has been captured, then the game is a draw), or 3-move repetition (if the two opponents make the exact same moves 3 times consecutively, the game is a draw).

Now that you know the symbols, let’s talk about how to write your moves using….

Descriptive Notation

Descriptive Notation is also known as English Notation.  It was the widely used form of notation by chess players and authors of chess books up until the 1970’s. It is still used by some chess players, though Algebraic has become the widely used form of notation (infact FIDE does not even allow Descriptive Notation at international events).

In descriptive notation, you are using the aforementioned symbols for all the pieces.  The location of each square is annotated by 1) if it’s Kingside or Queenside, 2) Which piece’s starting location corresponds to that file/column (for instance if it’s the file of the starting position of the Rook on the Kingside, every space in that file would be KR), 3) how many ranks from the player it is (this can be tricky… the 5th rank for white is only the 4th rank for black).

So, from our starting position (I’ve taken out the numbers and letters so you won’t be confused):

If white moves his King Pawn 1 space forward, and then black moves the Pawn in front of his queenside Bishop one space, like this:

It would be written as follows:

 P-K4          P-QB4

As you can see, the tricky part comes from a) recalling if the space is on the Kingside or Queenside, and b) counting the ranks from each opponent’s prospective, not just your own (because, as said, white’s 5th rank is black’s 4th rank).

When capturing a piece, you denote it as X.  On the plus side, you only piece is doing the capturing and what piece is being captured.  in most cases this is simple:

The white Pawn taking the black Pawn would be written simply as

PxP

The only time you have to go into more detail is if a piece (or multple pieces of the same type) can take multiple pieces of the same type.  For instance

Here you have 2 white Knights that could each take 2 Pawns.  Therefore you cannot simply write NxP because the question of “which Knight took which Pawn” comes up (although, in this case you’d want to move your Queen to saftey, but for the sake of this lesson, let’s just say you were going to take a pawn with a Knight and do a queen trade.  So our intended move for this is:

Which is written as

N(QB)xP(QN)

Which means: the kNight in the file where the Queenside Bishop started is capturing (x) the Pawn in the file where the Queenside kNight started.

Placing someone in Check will be denoted by the move of the piece putting someone in check followed by a + and a Checkmate will be the move followed by a ++.  For instance, in our first quiz question a couple weeks ago:

The queen was at KB3 before the positon and took the pawn at black’s KB pawn for a Checkmate which would be written like this:

QxP++

We don’t need to say which Pawn because it was the only Pawn the Queen could take from where she was.

In the next blog, we’ll talk about algebraic notion and compare it to descriptive using the same examples we used here.

Have a topic you’d like me to cover or a question you’d like to ask? send me an e-mail at [email protected]